The Russian prime minister says it’s necessary to return state officials to management boards of major state companies as the crisis situation in the economy demands tougher government control over investment and spending.

“Considering the necessity of a stricter control over
activities of state-controlled companies, their economic
indicators, money and foreign currency movement and
implementation of investment programs, at the current moment I
consider itreasonable to return to civil servants’ participation
in boards of directors,” Dmitry Medvedev said at the final
government session of 2014.

The PM noted that allowing government ministers and deputy
ministers to participate in executive or supervisory boards of
major government controlled corporations would make the
obligatory control procedures more effective.

President Vladimir Putin, who also attended the government
session, said the current situation might require “manual
management” of the economy.

“We must have everything under control. If such need arises
we must switch to so-called manual management even though some
might not like it. Now it is absolutely justified,” Putin
told ministers.

Russian reform removing state officials from the boards of major
state companies started in 2011, when Dmitry Medvedev was
president. The intention of the move was to boost competitiveness
and effectiveness of state owned businesses, and it was done
together with granting more rights to minority shareholders and
introducing additional anti-corruption safeguards.

In March 2012, Medvedev ordered that all state corporations must
remove civil servants from their boards within three years. The
decision caused several major staff moves. Igor Sechin, deputy
prime minister of the day, left the board of the oil major
Rosneft, and then-Energy Minister Sergey Shmatko quit his post in
the natural gas monopoly Gazprom, while Aleksey Kudrin, finance
minister at the time, was removed from the supervisory boards of
the VTB bank and the diamond mining giant Alrosa.